An Uplifting Video

DONATION SPAM

John Kasley: “Not much you can do about it, I suppose but you should know that those of us who gave our little pittances are drowning in emails from needy Democrats. It’s no more attractive having your address shared when it’s done by an organization whose motives I generally support. I live in Florida and some nice man in Oregon named Merkley seeks access to my billfold. Alas! Were he alone the supplicant, things might be different, but Tom Udall, Tim Leahy, Bill Nelson, Sandra Fluke, Organizing for Action, Nancy Pelosi, Equality Florida, Lois Frankel, Kelly Ward, Kari Thurman, Joaquin Castro, Jeremy Funk, Jon Isaacs, Jean Shaheen, Elizabeth Warren, Democrats 2014, Democrat Headquarters, Brandon English, Evan Wolfson, Andrew Weinstein, and Mindy Myers have all pleaded for money. Did I mention Farley Griner? This list only goes back about 5 days. Giving to them all could leave me with insufficient funds to help Mr. Chioma from Paraguay, who is working with Mr. Atami from Benin, who apparently has a fortune waiting for me.”

☞ Oh, don’t I know it. Going forward, you might give recipients of your largesse a separate email address you rarely look at . . . or even give a fake, like “donot@email.com,” for people and organizations you want to help but not hear from.

Otherwise, you’re right: I don’t know what to tell you – except, I guess, that as sacrifices go, having to “safe unsubscribe” a couple of times a day (or “delete, delete, delete” 20 times a day), is, perhaps literally, “the least we can do” for our country.

And yet it drives me a little nuts, too.

MARRIAGE IS EASY: NO ONE HAS TO WRITE A CHECK

Matt Miller wonders whether Senator Rob Portman — who came out for marriage-equality because he has a gay son — would be more inclined to help the needy if he had a needy son. He concludes his latest column:

. . . Barney Frank quipped to the New York Times this week that “my sexual attraction to men is [now] more politically acceptable than my attraction to government.”

That’s wry and profound. Maybe America’s accelerated “evolution” on gay marriage proves that the ultimate taboo in our society is redistribution. As Martin Luther King Jr. learned near the end, securing legal equality turned out to be the easy part. Nobody had to write a check. Equal opportunity and economic justice are entirely different matters, requiring a nation to take even bigger leaps of empathy and imagination.